Dr. Herb London: On 9/11, We Must ‘Recapture the Truth That This Is a Unique Nation Worth Defending’

Getty Images9 Sep 2016

On Friday’s Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM, Dr. Herb London of the London Center for Policy Research told Breitbart Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow that Americans should commemorate 9/11 by remembering what has made our country such a threat to the forces of oppression throughout our history.

“It is not enough to simply say we are engaged in a battle against radical Islam, but we must say as well that the United States has principles, ideas, and a romance that has to be recaptured,” he said. “The romance of our Founding Fathers and the way this country was created represents a unique moment in history.”

“If I were asked the question, ‘What is the most important thing that has happened in the last thousand years?’ the answer for me is very simple. It’s not merely the fact that people can fly in an aircraft, or that we have electricity, or that we have computers, or that we have new ways of communication. None of these things would have happened were it not for the creation of the United States. The building of America was the building of a unique vision. That vision continues to exist. That beacon of light that shines from the Statue of Liberty shines as a source of emulation across the globe,” London said.

“We have to recapture that feeling,” he urged. “We have to understand why some Chinese kids would build a Statue of Liberty in Tiananmen Square in order to emulate the kind of liberties that we are privileged to enjoy in the United States. That, it seems to me, is what we should be thinking about on 9/11. What is unique about America? Why should we be defending this nation? Why these freedoms have to once again be remembered?”

He said he recently read a speech John Adams delivered in Braintree, Massachusetts, in which he argued, “If we remember what is intellectually true, we will remember the virtues that we have been handed. Our country will survive. But if we lose our sense of them, if we lose those moral positions, the United States will be servile, and could end up as a slave state.”

“There are so many things in our society today that suggest that,” said London. “We have lost our moral compass. We are moving in a very different direction. This post-modern world suggests we don’t even know what truth is. Truth is whatever you want it to be.”

“Well, we’ve got to recapture a truth, and the truth that I think is very important for Americans to understand is that this is a unique nation that is worth defending,” he declared. “And the principles behind it, the liberties behind it, are worth defending. And every single day, we should wake up and say, ‘Thank God we live in this country.’ This is not a land of oppression. This is the land of opportunity.”

Dr. Herb London is a co-author of The Encyclopedia of Militant Islam, which he describes as “giving you some sense of why we’re fighting this battle, and what the battle is all about, including a kind of encyclopedic examination of 44 of the terrorist groups that are challenging the United States today.”